Ohio Voting Disputes Take on New Intensity

With alleged death threats, suspicious mail and a surfeit of lawyers, the battle over Ohio voting procedures has reached a new level of ugliness.

Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner said her office has been barraged with phone calls and e-mails that contain "menacing messages and even threats of harm or death." Authorities are investigating those incidents, as well as a suspicious package mailed to her office last week that contained an unidentified powder and was covered with threatening messages, she said.

ENLARGE

Ohio State Secretary Jennifer Brunner
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Ms. Brunner, a Democrat, said her office had to disable parts of its Web site late Monday after a security breach. The site was restored Tuesday, and a spokesman said it doesn't contain voters' personal information. The state Highway Patrol is helping to investigate the incident.

In Cincinnati, the Hamilton County prosecutor -- who also is the local chairman of Republican Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign -- launched a grand-jury investigation last week following complaints about some early voters. On Monday, he turned the case over to a court-appointed special prosecutor, after Democrats complained that the allegations were politically motivated. Now, the board of elections is fighting over whether to hire an attorney to keep tabs on the prosecutor.

As in 2000 and 2004, when President George W. Bush narrowly won the state's 20 electoral votes, Ohio could be crucial to this year's contest. Polls label it a tossup, and Sen. McCain and Democratic Sen. Barack Obama are visiting frequently. New rules easing early voting are bringing many more Ohioans out to vote in October than in previous elections.

One point of contention between Ms. Brunner's office and the Ohio Republican Party concerns whether officials must match voter-registration information with other government records. On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court stayed a temporary restraining order that would have required thousands of newly registered Ohio voters to undergo added scrutiny.

In Hamilton County, prosecutor Joseph Deters issued subpoenas late last week seeking detailed records on about 40% of the more than 600 people who registered and cast a ballot on the same day from Sept. 30 through Oct. 6. The same-day process has been another source of fights between the Ohio Republican Party, which raised concerns about potential fraud, and Ms. Brunner's office.

Mr. Deters, who is the southwest Ohio regional chairman for the McCain campaign, said in an interview Tuesday that his office had received complaints about people voting illegally. He declined to identify the source of the complaints. He said a cursory review showed that about one in four of the voters in question wasn't listed in other government databases, and about 100 were listed under a different address.

Democrats on the board of elections called Mr. Deters's investigation politically motivated, citing his role in the McCain campaign. "For people to start running around like the prosecutor did yesterday, claiming rumors about voting fraud, it's only in their mind," said Tim Burke, a Democratic board member.

Mr. Deters denied the charges of partisanship. "I've never discussed this with any campaign and would never do something like that," he said. He turned over the investigation to a special prosecutor Monday, he said, because "I thought these issues were too important to get bogged down in partisan rhetoric."

Democrats on the election board sought in an emergency meeting Monday to have the board seek its own special counsel to advise it on any actions by the prosecutor. The board, composed of two Republicans and two Democrats, deadlocked on the motion.

By law, Ms. Brunner is authorized to break the tie. A spokesman for her office said Tuesday that she hadn't received a request for a tiebreaker vote. Mr. Burke said he hoped the paperwork would be sent to her office shortly.

Corrections & Amplifications George W. Bush won 21 electoral votes from Ohio in the 2000 presidential contest and 20 electoral votes from the state in 2004. This article said he won 20 votes there both years.

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